Blogs that Make Money: Scraper Site Update

Blogs that Make Money is skipping Friday Social today because I'd like to touch on another subject real quick that might be useful to you.

Sites that scrape your content.

You know I am flattered that someone copied parts of my blog word for word without giving me credit. They also copied Yaro Starak and Zac Johnson so they have at least been doing their research in a blogging sense.

Here is how I have been handling the situation. You get the bits and pieces here first then I'll do a full post when the whole process is done.

Copyscape - Gerald from Search Engine Marketing Group sent me his post Combating Online Plaigerism and I thought well I'll check Copyscape for fun. Now I'm glad I did!

I found a money blog site and it copied two of my posts (as far as I know right now) Blog Marketing Tools and Blog Traffic: How to Get It! word for word with no links back to my site. Not only that, all the links that I had mentioned to my Twitter and Technorati profiles they switched to theirs!

Copyscape gives you five free searches per month and what I suggest if you have a blog is to do each page individually. After that it is five cents per page to sign up for Copyscape which is totally worth it.

So there you go. Copyscape to the rescue.

Making Contact - Unfortunately this blogger did not have any contact info and I did not want to leave a comment because I would have to reveal my Blogger identity and I was not interested in doing that. Read on to see the next part of the story since I was unable to contact him.

Google and Copyright Infringement
- If you read the post Combating Online Plaigerism you will see a link to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Basically you send hard copies of proof that someone is using your intellectual property well beyond fair use to Google and they will investigate. I'm still in that process and wanted to do something immediately...so I contacted...

Technorati
- They were using Technorati and Performancing Ads so I decided to contact these two companies and see what their policy was for members who swipe content. Performancing Ads was unable to do anything as it was not in their policy to police certain blogs in their network, which I'm totally okay with. It was worth a shot.

Technorati on the other hand sent me a nice reply email that they do not tolerate copyright infringement by their users and to please send them more info. I did and what I was told a few days later was the blog in question had been removed for "lack of original content".

Yippee! Sucess.

So this is just the beginning. I now have Technorati to back me up a little to offer up to Google that they also found the blog in question...questionable. :)

So don't let people scrape and steal your intellectual property! Do something about it today!

If you really missed Friday Social which I hope you did. Here are the last few to take a look at:

Friday Social - Crystal Hapiness
Friday - Keep in Touch

Comments

  1. Jordan,

    Thanks for the mention. You are too kind. Also keep in mind you can look up their host and file a DMCA complaint and have their website shut down at the host level. You can try using doman tools and see if you can look at the DNS find out who is hosting the site. Comtact the theifs hosting company and BAM. You will have to prove who publish content to the web first. You can easily do that using Internet Archive

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  2. Hee hee sounds good. :) I never thought of contacting Adsense too. They may just have the same info and that is to go to the DMCA page. I'll look into it and report back.

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  3. Copyscape is a great idea! I have been using it for quite some time when I first saw an app for a website that searched out blogs and automatically posted related posts on the site word for word. This is such a ripoff!!
    I take lots of time writing content for myself and others and I do not want someone else just taking it without giving credit.

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